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The Hot Girl III – Special Instance Backstory 2.5

Someone posted recently about “can you write on demand?” I answered “yes” because as a professional in another industry I have known editors and performance critics and art directors who throw things out, or back, with the expectation that something “creative” will be done, or enhanced, by their feedback. Since I was young. Two Hundred years ago. There was no followup to flowers in the sink. But LP posed a question of sorts, that made sense. Loose ends. Talk about draft mode…

Jackson’s Apartment – Wednesday, February 15, 1978

Jackson opened the door of his apartment, found Deanna studying in the same chair as always at his fake slate topped dining table, only she was behind a vase full of crazily arranged yesterday’s sink toss flowers and a stack of three books. Plus an open one and an open notebook, all facing the right direction to be used and useful.

“Card’s on the bed, Jax. Sorry.” She pushed her glasses up into a hair band for her wet hair. “I came back and fixed the flowers last night. Once a year, you know?” She tapped the vase with her pencil. “I don’t do very good. Where’d you go?”

“The city.” The vase got a glance and very tight smile. Deanna perpetuated her mom’s ‘no dead flowers except Valentine’s and anniversaries’ rule, only without Mom Jean’s eye for composition. “I dropped a load at Next Time Around. Went to Glenn’s. He made me smoke something with a name that sounded like a Mexican resort, then made me listen to Reggae all night like I’d never heard it and didn’t know how easy the guitar solos were until I passed out on the couch. I woke up with a cat that Stacey talked him into keeping rubbing its ass on my nose, bashed my leg on his coffee table, beat the speed trap south of town and made it to my eight-thirty.” He checked the clock on the stove. “Two-forty and everything still smells like cat butt, mixed with shampoo.”

“He didn’t make you do anything.” She closed a book and notebook, opened another of each. “Why do you hang out with people like that?”

“Glenn’s okay. You don’t like him, but Stacey does. Now that he’s finally got his accounting degree.” He rubbed his eyes, yawned. “She’ll be a VP at Morisé when Amanda finally puts all her Dad’s shit in one bucket. Amanda likes him, too, so he can’t be that bad.”

“He is that bad, they just can’t see it. He’s way older than you are, and he may be an accountant, like finally after forever, but he’s still that fake-y charm guitar player guy he always has been. And you could say ‘when Amanda completes her father’s partnership acquisitions’, not when her dad’s shit’s in a bucket.”

“He’s eight years older than we are. The same age as Stacey and Amber and Bev.” He pulled his sweater over his head, sniffed it, backhanded it into the bedroom. “How about, ‘Little and much will change, my love, quand la merde est réunie, oui’?”

“You do that to everybody, Jax. Yesterday I was stealing your stuff in a country song and now you’re making up fake French like Alix said something about shit in a bucket. She wouldn’t do that. Alix is like a legal and business genius who went to five or six colleges in four countries. And lady geniuses don’t talk like that. Really, they don’t.” She absently tapped a women’s world lit anthology without looking at it. “I know.”

“What she said, in French, was ‘when the shit is joined together, yes?’ If cussing is the barricade against genius you’re sunk down here in Dumbassville with the rest of us, D.” He laughed, headed for the bedroom, pulled off his t-shirt on the way. “I need a shower. How long have you been out?”

“A while. Asshole.” She leaned over the table, tried to follow him with her eyes. “Aren’t you going to read your card first?”

“It waited a day. It can wait till I don’t stink.” He knew she wanted to throw something, grab her books and slam the door again but she was entrenched in her studies, with wet hair, in one of his shirts and probably nothing else. He’d take a shower, bust on her for re-using the only Valentine’s card she’d ever bought him with an added line, and he’d ask why, and she’d say she couldn’t buy him cards “because, alright?” Happy recycled Valentine’s Day. Yesterday. Sorry.

If this Wednesday turned out like all the Wednesday’s lately, Deanna would take over his bathroom for half an hour bitching and dialing in her hair and be in her advisor’s office from four-thirty until the regally tall, twig thin, nasally, outright hostile distaste for him Dr. ‘Cruella DeVille’ Eckden cut her loose, starved, at almost ten. Deanna, her head full of whatever they were putting together, would drive past the Feathers and Fins drive-through, walk in the door of his apartment, drop her books on the floor, fall on the couch and tell him what an angel he’d be if he’d go get her a chicken sandwich, no mayo or mustard or any of that. From Feathers and Fins.

He’d go. Get a fish sandwich for himself and some extra fries, stop at the 7-11 on the way back and buy a nearly frozen beer from the pink, bulbous blonde woman who talked with an accent full of “echhh” and “awkkk” like she was trying to clear a wad of snot from her throat. He stuck his hand in the shower to check the temp. Still cold. Dammit, D…‘A while’?Three minutes? He dropped his forehead into the crook of the arm that held him to the wall, the wet hand dripped cold water on his foot. What had fucking happened?

Well, you’d have to read the whole front end to figure out what happened to these two was formative, and then good. Starcrossed, as the cliche goes. However, today is the last glimpse into a collapsing yesterday. The girl who dreamed of giving men the finger, for their behavior, of being the Brave New Voice of Feminism, the Elegant Hell in High Heels (who is actually Jackson’s mother) is about to…

You must have some models you used as fodder for conversations you create. People around you who talk at each other with flair and jibes and needles.
I don’t know anybody like this. And imagining them verbally slinging stones and mortars might give me a headache were I to try.